The Canadian men’s team at the Sochi Olympics didn’t play the hockey we Canadians love the best. Instead, it executed to near perfection the tactics that now define the game.

In doing so, Team Canada dominated like few teams before have done at a best-against-best international hockey tournament.

In six games, Team Canada allowed just three goals against. It outchanced its opponents 153 to 53. Against its three strongest opponents — Finland, Sweden and the USA — Canada remarkably gave up just one goal and 26 scoring chances against.

Team Canada. Jean Levac/Postmedia Olympic Team photo

For all that, though, this Team Canada squad wasn’t one that I was hoping to see before this tournament commenced. You see, I’m a Canadian hockey chauvinist, and in my imagination, Canada is to hockey what Brazil is to world football: the cauldron of creativity, where the greatest attacking genius is given free reign to develop and dominate.

We Canadian elitists want Team Canada to play the game as if Maurice Richard, Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Paul Coffey and Wayne Gretzky were on-ice every shift, riding on the roar of the crowd, making lightning dekes and passing combinations, unleashing thundering shots.

At Sochi, however, Team Canada didn’t play firewagon hockey. Instead, the team was built to defend by heady play away from the puck, interspersed with fierce, decisive thrusts to win possession.

Team Canada competed with a ferocious precision. Its defensive play was unique in that it was not predicated on unrelenting, old-school Canucklehead hitting. The team was not going to win by clobbering opponents into submission but by angling them into the boards and denying them passing lanes in the slot.

The team’s mantra was to play on the right side of the puck, the right side of the man, and to have all players on every line do so. The top attacking forwards — Sidney Crosby, Ryan Getzlaf and Jonathan Toews — weren’t just expected to grudgingly buy into this defensive system but to enthusiastically lead it.

And they did.

As befits a team defined by cagey defensive team play, Team Canada had four balanced, two-way lines. The scoring chance data tells us that team captain Crosby chipped in on 5.3 even-strength scoring chances per game (an outstanding number), with his linemates Chris Kunitz at 4.3 and Patrice Bergeron at 3.7. The trio averaged 4.4 contributions to scoring chances at even strength per game.

Carey Price (L), Jeff Carter and Ryan Getzlaf (R) of Canada skate off the ice after beating the USA in the men’s hockey semifinal. Photo by Jean Levac/Postmedia News

But the second line of Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Jamie Benn also averaged 4.3 per game. The third line of Jeff Carter, Toews and Patrick Marleau averaged 5.6 per game. The fourth line of Matt Duchene, Rick Nash and Martin St. Louis averaged 3.9 per game — somewhat less, but only because they got less ice time.

There were no specialty units, not one line for scoring, another for checking and another for energy. There was no real top line. They were all top lines and all were expected to play a two-way game.

In building a defence-first team, it’s clear Team Canada brass made the right call. For one thing, Team Canada has struggled to win on the bigger Olympic-size ice surface, succeeding only in 1972 in Moscow, winning three of four games to take that series, and also winning in 2002 at Salt Lake.

In the 13 best-against-best tournaments or series since 1972, Team Canada has won nine of them but has gone untied and undefeated only one other time, the 2004 World Cup. That team had the advantage of playing at home on NHL ice surfaces. It isn’t in quite the same class as the 2014 squad.

The only team that compares to this Sochi group is the 1976 Canada Cup squad of Hull and Orr, which lost one game on its way to winning that tournament but nonetheless dominated both on the attack and on defence. It truly was Brazil on ice.

But hockey has transformed since 1976. Defensive technique has advanced so much that it’s an astonishing feat to deke one world-class defender now, let alone an entire team of them. This Team Canada didn’t just accept that reality, it embraced it, creating a defensive team almost impossible to work around.

It had the right recipe, the right selections, the right lines, the right strategy. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine another Team Canada ever getting it more right.

Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples is a regular contributor to The Cult of Hockey analytics blog

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